Written by a top black
intellectual, it has been denounced by other black intellectuals as a setback
to the race.

Within its 175 pages is a dispassionate, erudite discussion of
400 years' usage of what's variously been called "the six-letter word," "the filthiest,
dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language" and, simply, "the N-word."

The
book is "Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word" (Pantheon, $22). Its
author, Randall Kennedy, said in a telephone interview: "I have had conversations
about the book with friends and the title will somehow be unmentioned. A couple
of weeks ago, I went on a radio talk show in Detroit and had a wonderful, hourlong
discussion.

"But beforehand they told me, 'We have a strict rule here that
there is no use of the word "nigger." ' "
A Rhodes Scholar and Harvard Law
School professor, Kennedy will read from and sign copies of his book at Hawley-Cooke
Booksellers in Shelbyville Road Plaza on Wednesday from 7 to 8 p.m. (For more
information, call 893-0133.)

He also will be the featured speaker for a sold-out
NETWORK luncheon that day at the Main Branch of the Louisville Free Public Library.

Kennedy's book traces the epithet from slavery to the 21st century in conversation,
movies, literature, academics and the courts, noting its use by Presidents Truman,
Johnson and Nixon. In 1947, he reports, Philadelphia Phillies teammates yelled
from the dugout at Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers: "We don't want you
here, nigger!" In 2000, white Florida high school students ended a newsletter
attack on a black teacher with the phrase, "Die, nigger."
Other racial slurs
don't seem to take the same emotional toll.

"Other groups aren't as physically
distinguishable and don't have the history of slavery and racism," noted Anna
Bosch, director of the linguistics program at the University of Kentucky.

Generations
of black people have felt the sting of the word "nigger."

"It was a curse word,
a bad word, when I grew up as a child, calling someone out of their name, and
a no-no in our family," said Lillian Anthony, a retired official of Presbyterian
Church (USA). "Later, my research as an educator led me into documenting negative
images of black people. And a lot of the images had the word 'nigger' on them,
whether they were postcards, advertisements and artifacts.

"Seeing them didn't
hurt me, but I was offended, and angry. It's white people denying my humanity,
denying my humanness."

Car salesman Patrick Edwards said he was called "nigger"
at Pleasure Ridge Park High School when he was a junior there in 1983: "I was
in the lobby and this white girl who was arguing with her boyfriend rushed by,
bumped into me and knocked the change out of my hand as I was trying to buy a
Coke. I said, 'You need to watch where you're going, say excuse me.'

"And she
said, 'I ain't got to watch nothing, nigger.' I pushed her, she tried to kick
me, we got into a scuffle, and I was suspended. They didn't do anything to her."

Kennedy's book has several examples of public utterances of the word that resulted
in controversial firings. In Kentucky, pressure mounted on former Gov. A.B. "Happy"
Chandler to resign from UK's board of trustees in 1988 after he said, "Zimbabwe's
all nigger now," in a meeting about stock divestiture in then-apartheid South
Africa. He rejected demands that he resign and rode out the controversy.

Over
time, many believe the word has appropriated new, positive contexts, meanings
and connotations. Kennedy applauds its use as a bonding term of affection between
black men and in interracial friendships.
Actress Halle Berry, for example,
made it a pet name between interracial lovers in the 1998 movie "Bullworth," telling
Warren Beatty: "You know you're my nigger."

N.W.A., the Compton, Calif., rap-music
consortium that produced Ice Cube and Dr. Dre, stands for "Niggas With Attitude."
And Kennedy notes that Asian teens who assimilate hip-hop culture regularly call
each other "nigger," trying to be ghetto-authentic like their African-American
heroes.

"Tupac (Shakur, slain rap superstar) had an acronym for it," Edwards
said. "Never Ignorant Getting Goals Accomplished. It's taking something negative
that whites have said about you and turning it into something positive."

Kennedy
said, "I've been called 'nigger' across the gamut of ways that it is used. I've
been called 'nigger' with love, and I've also been called 'nigger' with malice.

"Do I use the word? No, I don't. But I do have friends who embrace me and say,
'Good to see you, my nigger.' Am I offended? No. Do I have white friends who have
called me 'nigger'? No. Can I imagine this situation? Yes.

"I'm not urging
people to use the word. It's not as if I'm trying to popularize it. I'm trying
to educate people about the way it's being used."

The idea for the book originated
with a series of lectures Kennedy delivered in 1998 at Stanford University, titled
"Who Can Say Nigger . . . And Other Related Questions."

Afterward, he searched
a legal database and found more than 4,000 court cases related to the word. In
some, verdicts had been invalidated because a juror said the N-word. In others,
judges and prosecutors were disqualified for using it as an insult.

After Kennedy's
book was published, some executives at Pantheon Books refused to utter the title,
and reportedly worried that it would hurt book sales. Kennedy's editor, Errol
McDonald, wrote "nigger" on a piece of paper and went around the office making
colleagues pronounce it.

"Sales have been really good for us," said Melissa
Bernstrom, public-relations director at Louisville's Hawley-Cooke Booksellers.
"But we've had no one ask for it by name. They tend to say, 'Do you have Randall
Kennedy's new book?' And at least one person just pointed to his picture in our
newsletter and said, 'Do you have this book?'

"I don't know if that's quantifiable,
but it's not how customers ask for other titles."

The book got gratuitous publicity
when Columbia Law School professor Patricia Williams and Duke University African-American
Studies professor Houston Baker said the book and its title would embolden racists
to use the word more.

Kennedy's wasn't the first book with the N-word in its
title. "Nigger" was the title of comedian/-activist Dick Gregory's 1964 autobiography,
and satirist Cecil Brown's debut novel in 1969 was called "The Life and Loves
of Mr. Jiveass Nigger."

"That was a more radical time," said David Anderson,
associate English professor at the University of Louisville. "The '60s were about
shocking people into new realities.

"But Kennedy's going to be judged on two
things: One, the tradition that says you should never use the word, or encourage
others to use it, so there's a sense of propriety that some people will believe
he's violated.

And others will ask whether the use of a provocative title is
a means of calling attention to himself."
Other epithets have evolved into
honorifics as modern usage subverts their original intent to offend. "Bitch,"
for example, defined by Webster's New College Dictionary as "a spiteful or ill-tempered
woman," became synonymous among some in the '90s with female assertiveness.

Kennedy
says keeping "nigger" taboo only reaffirms its power to harm. He writes: "In stressing
the 'terror' of verbal abuse, proponents of hate-speech regulation have, ironically,
empowered abusers while simultaneously weakening black students by counseling
that they should feel grievously wounded by remarks that their predecessors would
have ignored or shaken off."

Efforts to ban the word are futile anyway, Bosch
said: "I can't imagine it happening. It's very common that, over many centuries
of use, a word can take on a new meaning because it's used in a new context. It
may fall into disuse in its negative sense, and eventually be forgotten.

"But
part of the genius of language is its flexibility, and how people use words to
convey whatever meaning they want. I think the best we can hope for is that our
culture would change in such a way that it wouldn't be needed as a term of abuse."